Knob Noster and the B-2 Next Door

Knob Noster State Park was built by relief workers starting in January of nineteen thirty-six, converting exhausted farmland into forest and recreation on Missouri's central plains. The park handed over to the state in nineteen forty-six. Two miles south, the landscape shifted dramatically when The war brought the Sedalia Glider Base into existence in nineteen forty-two.

The base trained glider pilots and paratroopers during the war, then stayed active into the Cold War era. In nineteen fifty-five it was renamed Whiteman Air Force Base in honor of Second Lieutenant George Whiteman, a Sedalia native killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Whiteman today is the only base in the world that permanently hosts the B-two Spirit stealth bomber.

A park of walking trails and a forest of oaks sits two miles from the most exotic aircraft in the American arsenal.